Word: wente
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Blood Oath. When he came out of Sing Sing in 1928 (it was his second jail term), he promptly began to repair bridges with the Cosa Nostra. In 1930, after passing his initiation-successful participation in a gangland assassination -Valachi went before Capo Maranzano ("Gee, he looked just like a banker"). Joe took his oaths with blood from his trigger finger and with flaming paper ("This is the way I will burn if I betray the secret of this Cosa Nostra...
...operation. He bought his own race horses. During World War II, Valachi worked the gasoline black market, earning about $200,000 in three years from finagling with ration stamps. Even at that, he says, "I wasn't so big." After the war, he muscled into jukeboxes but also went respectable by sending his son to a private school and moving to suburban Yonkers. Then Valachi slipped...
...adultery by her Indian husband had to submit to an instant nose job, performed with a skinning knife. Many of the white traders were exceptionally devoted to their Indian wives. When John ("Liver Eating") Johnson's Flathead wife, the Swan, was murdered by Crow warriors, for example, Johnson went on the warpath, killed some 300 Crows, and ate their livers in revenge...
...Jacob Javits, looking fat and enormously confident, pointed out sourly that the speech was a strongly partisan one, an effort to rally the Democratic troops behind the Johnson programs and even behind Johnson himself. Apparently annoyed by LBJ's attempt to steal Nixon's already-feeble thunder, Javits went on to explain that the Johnson programs were really outdated anyhow, just warmed-over New Deal policies, and so on. There aren't very many poor people in the country any more, fewer than ever before, said Javits, and so he expected to see the incoming Administration striking...
That is why the loudest applause came when he said that his reason for coming to Congress that night was "purely sentimental." The applause, which went on and on until there were tears in the President's eyes, just didn't make any sense to the millions of people watching on television. They were watching a private ritual in which the nation had no part...